Misnamed
by Aka-Mainyu
Summary: After having quit his job once already, Hatake Kakashi finds himself being forced to relinquish his identity once more.


He sat, a cup – steaming – gripped firmly by both hands, cuddled up in a half-lump in the warm safety of his dampening felt coat and wools. The snow grew with each blink of the eye, cluttered up in lazy mounds and piles left and right. The sky was a smoky, dull off-white, the trees had long since donned gowns of silver and white. He always found Decembers the most beautiful of months, not least of all due to the miracle of winter. It was a simple pleasure he never failed to enjoy.

The dense, foggy taste of the tea lulled him into a shallow sense of security. It was still as hot as embers, pricking his tongue with every sip or taste. Its distantly familiar, friendly call was simply too pleasant to resist. He never had any will to try and break the shackles of this one particular habit he loved most.

He watched as steam rose off the cup, growing more timid with each sip. He watched it dance its final, ante-mortem dance, watched it mingle with the air and lose its essence, watched it dissipate and die. He watched it remind him of his painfully fragile mortality. He watched it forbid him to forget how he too'll die a meaningless death, fade like a wisp of milky steam in a December breeze. His back was sore, rubbing against the cold, hard, lifeless granite of the memorial stone.

He felt like he stood out amongst the snowy scarecrows, like he didn't belong in the one place he felt safe and at peace at. The oaks and pines, he saw, stared at him accusingly. The trees bled red tears. Winter was long upon them. Some had their winter thrust far too early on in their lives.

The flowers he'd brought were frozen near-solid, their leaves and rainbow faces hoary and as sensitive as thin glass, or maybe even ice. He'd always bring them a few lilies, occasionally a white rose. Sometimes so much time'd pass by between his visits that he'd find that somebody else visited the stone, sometimes he'd come so often he'd build a ring of roses around the rock. He hadn't been to see Obito in over a week that time.

He took another sip from the cup, sighed the softest sigh as he swallowed the milky tea. He never really wanted to acknowledge that none of it – or well, not all of it, if not nothing – was his fault, or even that there wasn't much he could do to change history. Some things just end up happening the way they do, and Hatake Kakashi had only just started coming to terms with his past and accepting the fact that he, for once, wasn't actually to blame for the biggest, most unavoidable mistakes of his life.

He just didn't want to end up on that list himself too soon.

He'd done the guilt routine at least half a hundred times each day. He lived, slept and breathed a smoke that tore at the soul and lungs, a sadness akin to a gaping hole in the heart. Nothing out of the ordinary. Having had everything taken from him, the only thing he clung on was the simple stencil carved into his _hitai-ate_ on his forehead. A number, a faceless face in a row of faces. He found being a disposable statistic somewhere between charming and utterly lovely.

He sold every single thing he ever had, was and owned to the one home he had grown to serve and take everything it served him with a spoonful of salt. They called the village's and villagers' strength to carry on the _Will of Fire_ , attached a nonsense cherry fondant outer coating to cover the gritty screws and seams of nationalistic patriotism up, keep them from prying, disenfranchised naïve eyes.

And then there was he and his kind. After enough years of service and serfdom in Konoha's army, one begins to grow dull and nonchalant about the general shittiness of life and the world.

He sighed. Nobody went there in winter. He left the empty cup by the side of the memorial, picked the box the ANBU messenger left him, pulled the _thing_ over his face. He'd never thought he'd have to serve like that again.

Konoha's streets were usually fairly dry and empty in the colder months. Most shops and stores would work until fairly late in the afternoon, but the owners would shut up shop far earlier than in spring or summer. Usually. Most of the time. At least official degree had the cafés and restaurants and casinos up all night. Give the people bread and circuses, drown the torches before they're even lit.

He stopped to get an apple, check the time, chat the cashier up to pass the time. Like he had any need to. No matter how hard he stared at the clock mounted by the check-out desk, he found the clock was unwilling to comply and turn itself back. He was an hour and a half behind.

The simple façade that 'his' coffee shop had put up made it a nuisance to find in the foggy, snowed back alleys of the village's downtown hinterland. The door chimed a simple tune behind him. The musky punch of a steamy, holed-up caffeine bunker never failed to jab his senses wide awake. He breathed in a mouthful of the warm, warm, painfully humid air – if there even was any oxygen left in the shop that'd give the mist that name – and ordered another cup of tea. His mark was already there.

He knew who the masked man was, even as the polished wood hid his identity. _Definitely_ _not a fox_. By the 'look' the man gave him, the inverse was true. Yet, they'd play and keep the charade going, even for that short while.

He put the apple down on the table, to which the man nodded. _Not an ANBU either_. It was him, no doubt about it.

"So," said Fox, "you've come."

"Apologies for the inconvenient delay."

"It's okay, I wouldn't have expected anything less. As a matter of fact, the fact that you came was actually quite a pleasant surprise. I didn't expect you to be so _close_ to the agreed time. The apple was merely a simple formality."

Kakashi – _Dog_ – gave him a look most annoyed.

"How many dogs have you seen waking into bars looking for foxes?" Fox asked, then chuckled at his own joke.

"Anyway, I thought it'd confuse the people better. It apparently worked on you just as well! Ah well, it might come in handy if one of us ends up craving some sugar in his stomach."

"I'm not quite sure what the point of all of this is. The ANBU left me these -" he tapped his vaguely canine mask and the small wooden box, "– and told me to meet you here of all places. If anything, they should've given you a monkey's mask, not a fox's. What's the deal, though?"

Fox sighed, leaned back in the soft plush chair and waved his hand in a suggestively dismissive manner. _If there were a face attached –_

"The old man organised all of this, this whole masquerade and whatever. He told me _nothing_ other than that I was supposed to meet up with you here – hey, your tea's getting cold –"

"– It isn't for me –"

"– and that we were gonna have to get to the tower as soon as we met up. He told me you were gonna be late so they worked around that. I don't really get why they needed _this_ level of anonymity – I got ambushed by the delivery boy in my _sleep_ –but it's refreshing, I guess."

"Refreshing? How could it ever be refreshing?"

"No, no, not in that sense. Let me explain... I mean I'm not finding it _fun_ or particularly enjoyable or anything, but it's a change of pace. Konoha's been stagnant for a few years now, and the vultures have begun to circle around us. No matter how hard we try and will it into being so, the world's not a static place; much has changed around us."

"And here we are, the spearhead of change," seethed Dog.

"Well, basically... yeah, I think so. They're planning something big. It's not an ANBU mission otherwise we'd … well, I'd still be home and you'd have gone off to somewhere; it's big and it's nasty and a bit of a refreshing reminder that mission work isn't merely just errand running and escort services – of both kinds."

"What's in the box, then?"

"Beats the hell out of me," said Fox as he tapped the one in his lap.

"Who's the tea for, though?"

"Let it be. We have to get going, I've kept them waiting for long enough."

He wrestled a small banknote out of his flak jacket pocket and left the cup of tea to rest on top of it. He picked his box up, dusted his pants off and turned to see Fox ready to go. They left the coffee shop not turning any heads or raising even a whispered question or two. Hear no evil, see no evil, get beaten up by no evil.

Even though it had to be at least twenty degrees below freezing, what with him burying himself in his coat and jacket, Fox walked bare-sleeved as he slung his box along under his arm. They walked in silence punctuated by the crunchy drum of their footsteps. Neither one spoke more than a handful of words to the other, nor to the clerks at the tower who, naturally, didn't ask any questions. Either they knew, or they knew not to mess with them.

The doors of the Hōkage's office were locked shut. Fox knocked twice, tapped the door as it failed to open immediately, knocked once more after a few more seconds. A couple of _clicks_ and _clangs_ and a heavy _thud_ and a bear mask pushed through between the door, now ajar.

Bear gave the duo a long, hard, judgmental look, turned around for a second or two, and turned back to nod at them. He then opened the door. First went in Fox, and then Dog. The sun had already begun to set, painting the small office chamber and the twelve people standing in it a rich, lively amber. Not one of them turned to see who had just entered. They knew.

He looked around, glanced at everything and everyone he could, walked forward to fill in the gap between the still-restless Fox and Bear. With the final addition of himself and Fox, Dog and his eleven masked companions stood in a single file, facing the Hōkage who still stood by the window. The moment he saw on the old man's face that he was relaxed and not at all angry with him and his escapades, he exhaled a breath he didn't know he had been keeping bottled up.

"Nice of you to finally have come. Now that you are here, I think we can begin," the old man said as he turned and started walking towards them.

"Boar, Lion, Dog, Fox, Bear, Wolf, Bird, Deer, Rabbit, Monkey, Rat, Snake. Yes, twelve. You might be wondering why I invited you all to come here today. It seems awfully formal, I'm sure, and nobody was informed of what was going on. My sincerest apologies. The situation is such that we – well, me primarily – had to have your identities concealed on your way here. I called you in so as to brief you all on the mission that you have, officially at least, volunteered to go on," he said, then turned away again.

"I am not quite sure that you've been given up-to-date information on what had happened in the ninja world before that _situation_ a couple of weeks ago, but that is mostly because we've also barely heard anything about it. Since the mission that you shall be going on has been planned out and prepared for in utmost secrecy and with great loss of life, I'll have to request you first do one more thing. Please, put the boxes down on my desk, it's alright."

Dog saw that he wasn't the only one that complied. Naturally. He looked over the big, huge wax seal that bound the two halves of the box together. The box was otherwise inconspicuous. It even resembled a standard shipment box used for things such as monetary transports or the temporary storage of some frail book or scroll. The one thing that gave it away was its feathery-light weight.

"You'll find that they contain some pretty fundamental tools for the success of this mission. There isn't much weight to them, within them are not the instruments that you will get to use there. You'll also find it's a simple wax seal, so it shouldn't be much of a technical hassle to break."

Dog nodded and looked at the seal. He figured it'd take at least some elementary chakra moulding technique. It was big enough to comfortably encompass the palm of his hand which he fitted on top of it. He inhaled, counted to three and pressed chakra out of the pores on his palm and fingers. It took only a handful of seconds for the wax to become glossy, then mushy, then formless as the Konoha seal oozed away with the rest of the red wax. He slid the top of the box off, put it right in front of the box's body.

It was filled to its brim with strips of straw and fluff, and in the midst of it all was a thin slip of paper that housed a nauseatingly elaborate seal. He did as the rest did, and took the piece of paper in his hand, slipped it between the mouth crack on the mask and took it into his mouth. He felt it melt away, felt the paper fuse with his lower lip and cheeks. His lips were, officially, sealed shut, at least in the metaphorical sense.

"That was of the utmost importance. Now that that part is done, let me just say that you will not be officially credited for this. A single A-Rank mission will be attributed to your names, but it will not be referenced anywhere in any official paper. As of a few minutes ago, you officially do not exist as far as the village is concerned. We don't know you, want you, know that you are alive. I am not sure if I should expect any of you to return, but I sincerely hope it all turns out a success. As of today, we are no longer accountable for you," he said and turned to go sit at the desk.

Looking up at the twelve people gathered around him – people, not men, as Dog came to see that there were four women in the mass of people – the Hōkage took out and lit his pipe.

"You will be doing an infiltration mission into Mizu-no-Kuni, with the primary focus being on espionage and gathering information. Ever since the eruption of this latest Mizu Civil War, we've been kept almost completely in the dark, and the flow of information into and out of the country has been thoroughly minimised. You will act as our eyes and ears, and we'll play dumb and deny not being blind."


End file.
